I find it interesting how people tend to look for deep personality, sixuality, and morality issues where there aren't any. There's a little thing called "abstraction" that some people may want to get a look it - you don't have to be a potential psychopat or a morally dubious person to enjoy playing as a assassin or thief, for instance. This kind of game put in your hands a tool for creating any sort of character you might be able to put off with the assets given. Might as well explore the possibilities.

Now, when I get my hands on a game where I can create my own character, I create a whole buncha chars, both genders, and end up picking the most interesting ones, based on design and concept. Whenever it's relevant to the gameplay, I pick one to be the "good one" and other to be the "evil one", without any gender-related instance. In TES series, my main character is a male because I'm too used to him. In Fallout 3 and NV, I started with a female character that I enjoyed a lot, created a male that was far more awesome, and ended up creating another male who sums up about everything playing FO is to me. In other games, my character is as much of one gender as of the other, based in how much I enjoyed the results I achieved. It depends on the mood, on what do you think will fit with that particular game experience, and there's no point of having the flexibility of creating a custom character if you let something as pragmatic as your natural physiology make the decisions for you. If you feel you can connect better with a person of your gender, fine. If you find more pleasant to look at something you find attractive, fine as well.

I find particularly interesting how much people atribute sixual desires about these matters. Being a bit of cartoonist myself, and having a strong emphasis on character design, I get asked a lot why do I draw so many females, and why they're generally so sixualized. I simply find it very interesting drawing them, hell yes, I like them sixy, and I surely think I'm entitled to portrait my characters in any way I see fit, but sometimes I'm amazed of how much sixual appeal people find on a drawing I do without even thinking about it at all. Whenever I find it interesting, and it is very often, I draw males, old men and women alike, children and animals, robots, monsters and all kind of nonsense. But people are always commenting on the females. I ended up concluding that the meaning is actually on those person's eyes and minds. I'm just drawing.

Yeah yeah, "yap yap TL/DR".

What rapier wit. Cut me to the quick!

Gender divisions are at their core derived from the fact that men and women have differing physical abilities, and are valuable to society in very different ways. If we are to take the vast bulk of human history, from the very beginnings of Homo sapiens, men fight, while women do not unless their survival or the survival of the tribe is at stake. There is a reason for that; two, in fact. One, men are larger and stronger. Yes, I'm sure you know some woman that could kill some other man you know with her bare hands, but the point stands: men are larger and stronger than women, and hence better equipped to fight, whether fighting a moose to kill it for dinner, or fighting another tribe to make them leave your tribe alone. The other is that in terms of breeding, the loss of a woman is more detrimental than the loss of a man. A large tribe of fifty women and ten men would be a little narrower genetically than you might like, at least for that generation, but it would essentially face no problems in producing the next generation. A neighboring tribe of ten women and fifty men would be absolutely screwed. They would not be able to breed at the same rate as the first tribe, and if they were somewhat settled (nomadic, but roaming withing a fairly small area) then they might well be wiped out or absorbed by the first tribe in a generation or so, or at least pushed out of the area to look for new, uncontested land. In hunter-gatherer societies, the male warriors will sometimes raid a neighboring tribe and make off with some of their women; do you think the opposite ever occurs, that a tribe sends a bunch of female warriors to raid a neighboring tribe and steal some of their men?

These are the fundamental evolutionary pressures that affect everything else. Culture adds to and shapes and modifies these basic biological realities, but it ultimately derives from our genetically-coded sixual dimorphism - which is ultimately a rather mild form of sixual dimorphism compared to some other organisms. Read about anglerfish and how they breed some time.

You cannot expect our ideas about gender roles to be valid in a world where magic exists. That throws everything out the window. We have no past to go on with multiple races and magic, so we cannot judge this world by our own.

The female adventurers I don't find really out of the ordinary; adventurers are unique, right? I just find the fact that other characters in the game don't find it out of the ordinary, and that the guards and blacksmiths and shopkeepers and the like seem to be even male and female (haven't been to every city and town, so I can't speak definitively) to be a trifle jarringly anachronistic. A world without gunpowder or electricity yet where female guards are as common as male guards is just...it just is pointless. I can suspend my disbelief for magic and unusual, fantastical creatures and the like; I don't particularly care to have to suspend my disbelief in social matters.

Because I'm female? Most games have male protagonists which in itself is not really a problem for me, it is really nice to have the option. So, I use it when it's available.
I also play male characters though, and don't really see the problem with guys who play female characters for whatever reason... It's a role playing game. Isn't part of that
the ability to check out how the other half lives in a very limited way?

one hell of a thread ill say....leomorg well done

I play as male characters. When was the last time you were actually intimidated by a female death overlord? Sure, you might've thought "DAAAAY-UM, I would hit dat booty!"

But in the end, the most BA characters are the ones that look like the Witch King from LotR.

http://images.wikia.com/lotr/images/c/cd/Witchking.jpg

In other games with 3rd person view, I mostly played a female character, as its more pleasing to the eye - you dont want to look at a ugly muscular ass for hours, do you?

Skyrim is one of the few games I played a male char to roleplay myself. The 2nd char, which I intend to play as a mean assassin, is female, as shes not "myself".

If magic power were being used as a replacement for electricity, etc, and people weren't doing manual labor with their own strength, I might agree with you. But even in Tamriel, which is fairly magic-heavy compared to some fantasy settings, magic is still the province of a minority and doesn't directly affect the day-to-day lives of the average person. People aren't plowing their fields and chopping wood and cooking dinner and hunting with magic. They're using their own strength, they're using animal strength, and they're using power from wind and water. Their means of doing things are the same means used by humanity from the time settled agriculture began around ten thousand years ago, right on up to two centuries ago in Europe and North America...and in fact right up to today in some less developed parts of Asia and Africa - their hands, the strength of a pair of oxen, and devices powered by the wind and the water.

So yes, given that magic is the province of a definite minority of people, I judge this world according to historic evidence. Now, go and start talking about World of Warcraft (never played it) then maybe you're right. As far as I can tell, magic is more common than dirty in WoW, so perhaps society could have developed differently. But Tamriel is not nearly so alien.

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